Oh My God (revisited)
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 12:08PM Oh My God (revisited)
There was something special about the creative season when the ideas for, “Good Monsters” began to form. We had been doing a lot of touring for Who We Are Instead and Redemption Songs as just a quartet. We left our rhythm section at home, and went out and played concerts with just the four of us.
The reasons for doing this were many, but it finally boiled down to the reality that we had been feeling unsatisfied by our live show. It was easy to string a bunch of songs together and play rock n roll. We used to navigate the Jars of Clay world by the philosophy that a good song can be stripped down to an acoustic guitar and a vocal and still be compelling. We were wondering if our songs still held up to that kind of scrutiny. So we put all of the electronics away, and for two years, stepped on stage with our voices and guitars.
It was a great way to remember the art of subtlety. Even when we were performing at huge music festivals, we would go out on stage and try to win the crowds with good songwriting and charismatic performances. It was intimidating when we would jump on stage after P.O.D., or Switchfoot, with all their arena rock majesty, and attempt to keep the energy strong with a Wurlitzer Piano, two guitars and four vocals and the occasional tambourine or shaker. We even played Live8 with that arrangement in front of 1 million people on the streets of Philadelphia. Both Redemption Songs and Who We Are Instead were records that worked in that configuration.
During those years of touring, we found something else when we stripped away all the lights and production. When our show became less complicated, so also, our lives. All the busyness of the day went away. We started realizing that we didn’t know each other very well. The greatest resource we had as a band, the thing that had the most equity attached to it was the sheer amount of time we had spent together. And as we looked at the long days and crazy experiences over 12 years, we found that we had at some point stopped talking to each other. We found ourselves needing community, and it wasn’t there.
I spent a lot of time in those years building Blood:Water Mission, traveling to Africa, and having my breath taken away by the kinds of horrific things I could not reconcile with. I saw the depth of depravity in Rwanda. I stood at the bedside of men who were on the verge of death. I watched children lay on cardboard sheets in hospitals as they waited for someone to die. They might be the next in line for a bed, where they could simply wait to die.
I was also realizing that I had been running away for most of my life. In Forrest Gump fashion, I just stopped. I decided I didn’t want to run anymore. And when I stopped, things caught up to me. Choices I had made, ways I had attempted to live as if God wasn’t real, people that I had hurt and was too ashamed to confront, all of those things came rushing back. It was a reckoning with the world I had made, and the one I had no control over. I found suffering and loneliness, and I found grace and love in overwhelming amounts.
I don’t know how many times I have said it in interviews. There is something good about questions. I had forgotten to ask questions for a few years. And now questions came flooding in. Gary Haugen from International Justice Mission took me on a journey into the depths of the Rwandan Genocide. I saw hundreds of tiny shoes piled up, and heard the worst stories of what happens when God lifts his hand off of humanity. When God lets us be who we, in our depravity, would be, fear and anger and violence become deadly motivators. What happens when cultural restraints are lifted? 800,00 people are hacked to death in less than 100 days. Matt Odmark described his experience of reconciling what it was like to walk across benches because the floor was covered in skulls and human bones that had been left as a memorial to somehow honor the dead. He thought about the prayers of people who have nothing to defend. What are the prayers of people who understand that the hand of their aggressor is not being stayed? The prayer is simply, “Oh My God, please raise people from the dead.” It is all that matters. “Dear God, please be who you say that you are.”
In this same season, our friends Steve Garber and Oz Guinness were helping us in the conversation of, “What is it that we are supposed to do?” How do we navigate a “Christian community that doesn’t reward artists or help artists to be innovative?” What do we do as artists when “describing the world and God in it,” isn’t important to the gatekeepers of the industry and in radio? Our cultures were shifting. Our ideas were forming. More questions. We decided not to step any further into the worship conversation at that point. We decided it was worth the risk to describe the world where we had been over the last few years.
Good Monsters is a record about the duality of the heart. I remember staring at pictures in Rwanda, and being aware for the first time that I was capable of doing what seemed humanly impossible. It could be me. I could kill. I could be the aggressor. It is humbling to find that we carry the same chronic disease as the people we often choose to judge. It is also a step toward freedom and abundant life. We hide ourselves from people. We don’t embrace ourselves fully. We loathe ourselves, and work so hard to present versions of ourselves that are so incomplete that they are mostly alien. We think that if people don’t see our darkness, we won’t have to acknowledge it ourselves. It is hard work. We spend ourselves on hiding, and have very little left for loving.
All of these ideas were swirling in my head, and the heads of my band mates. We got in a room and turned our chairs toward each other and began to write. The songs that came out were surprising and scary and vulnerable. Those kinds of songs can only be born of questions that matter in times of awakening. Some questions, when they are found, will never go away. They are like scabs covering deep wounds, once scratched off the skin, they bleed slowly for a lifetime, but they remind us that we are alive and that we feel and think and embrace, and inhale and exhale.
Oh My God was a point of convergence. The depth of my hearts depravity, the pain I had walked through in the world, and the pain I observed through the stories and images and places I saw in Africa came together in this song.
It is a song in three parts.
Part one, simply setting the stage:
Oh, my God, look around this place
Your fingers reach around the bone,
You set the break and set the tone,
For flights of grace and future falls,
In present pain, all fools say, “Oh My God.”
Oh my God, why are we so afraid
We make it worse when we don’t bleed
There is no cure for our disease
Turn a phrase and rise again, or fake your death and only tell your closest friends
This verse really describes the human condition… we are fatally wounded people, tainted by sin, and plagued by shallow faith that sometimes doesn’t hold us as we search for a clear answer to the question of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Doubting the existence of God is part of our human story.
Part two of the song:
This is actually where the song began… Matt brought the question to the band, “Why do so many people use the phrase, “Oh My God?” And we began to think about the various people who use the phrase, and wondered if we could describe this in a song.
It is amazing to me that a person can use the same phrase to be both a curse and an affirmation. These three letters can be used in part of our deepest contentment and our deepest longing. So whores and angels and all of the above use it. People who believe in God and people who don’t still find need for this phrase.
Part three:
This is the rant. This is why I, in that season, spoke those words. I did not deliberate over these lyrics. The song was only sung once in the studio. These words were only written within seconds of singing. This is a gut level grouping of words. And it was a way of bringing the questions I had been storing up and forgetting about and remembering and fighting, to amplification. And so it ends with questions, just as it started.
We performed this song two times. We didn't edit it for the record, or add very much to it. It still is one of my favorite songs to sing.
Reader Comments (41)
This song is one of my favourite by the best band on earth, because of the raw, unapologetic display of emotion. It makes me think of the Psalmist a lot because of the sincerity. So glad I've finally got Dan's interpretation!!
The power behind this song, makes me grateful for the grace of a God who see us for who we really are, with all the ugliness and shame, but chooses to love us still. Thanks for sharing the story of this song with us. Looking forward to seeing "The Shelter" live on May 1st down here on the gulf coast!
Thank you for sharing these insights Dan. These accounts are moving - sometimes powerfully so and serve to challenge, compel, and question even as the songs themselves do.
As we strive to raise our heads and turn our muddy faces toward the Son.
Awesome post, one of my favorite songs - so powerful & riveting.
This is one of my favourite songs and one that has most strongly resonated with me. The first time I heard it, my soul ached because I realized that someone else had seen the same things that I had and was just as hurt by the brokenness in the world - and realized just how capable we are of causing it.
Good Monsters came out just after I returned from living in South Africa and I returned to the US shattered. Shattered by all of the stories that I witnessed daily while teaching with an HIV/AIDS prevention programme and counseling high school girls who had lost their parents, been raped, were starving, had seen their classmates killed, etc. Shattered by daily facing abuse from my teaching partner who raped me at night and during the day would lead worship in church and teach high schoolers about HIV/AIDS. Shattered by waking up to find robbers in my bedroom and later having to wonder if I should have chased them out or if I should have let them take whatever I had because they needed it more than me. I came back to the US and I was lost, to say the least. I was physically ill and emotionally bordering on beyond repair - I had to leave in order for the abuse to stop. And then I returned to a world where no one knew what had happened and ironically I felt almost more alone because I suddenly left the life that I knew where I was daily surrounded by these things and returned to a world where they were only stories, something happening somewhere, but not here.
When I heard this song, I felt so much less alone because I knew that someone else felt the same depth of things that I felt. I still listened to this song when I feel the depths of the brokenness of this world that I cannot reconcile. It still most echoes what I feel in my own heart.
This song is so powerful that I often can't bring myself to listen to it because it just destroys me. It describes how I feel when I watch the news, or hear about the latest natural disaster or human atrocity.
At the same time, I can't avoid it always, because "we make it worse when we don't bleed." I struggle to find a balance between facing-the-horrific-realities-of-this-world and not-going-insane-by-facing-them-too-much. I'm much saner when I ignore the news, but I don't think it's exactly what Jesus would have me do. Any guidance on how to deal?
Like the others have said, this is one of my favorite Jars songs, too. Sooo powerful and breath-taking. What a powerful, sobering post. I like hearing how you guys wrote it and recorded it, that you didn't edit your hearts. Sometimes it needs to be that way. Thanks.
this song was the 2nd song that came on my shuffle as i was getting ready this morning. i never really caught the "We make it worse when we don’t bleed" until today and it has stuck. interesting you wrote this today.
miss you much (but not for much longer!)
aj
I'll never forget the first time I heard this song I was at the YMCA walking laps around the overhead track. Unlike most of you, I was fairly new to Jars of Clay. My first album was the Christmas CD, which I liked, so I went on youtube to check them out. Flood-"oh, I remember that song!" Work-"Awesome!" Worlds Apart "Whoa!!"
So I'm sold. I buy "Essential Jars of Clay". Because I really loved the song "Work" and it seemed like a song that could get my juices flowing a little bit, so I start with that song. Of course the next track is "Oh My God". Slower song, so I slow down. I had heard Jars of Clay wasn't a "Christian Band" in the traditional sense, but I wasn't prepared for THAT! I can only imagine how silly I looked just standing there with a stunned looked on my face.
Learned my lesson. Never listen to a new Jars of Clay song for the first time in public. You never know what you're going to get. :)
This is one of my top 5 favorite Jars songs, but I listen to it sparingly so that it never loses it's impact.
Jeremy: "Never listen to a new Jars of Clay song for the first time in public. You never know what you're going to get. :)"
So true :)
This song is so hard to listen to. I often don't need much encouragement to descend into a place of darkness. But I love it, I love the song. Because who else is gonna sing about this stuff? Not many songs allow me access to express how angry I am at the "babies underneath their beds, the hospitals that cannot treat, the rage of watching mothers" and our lack of any reasonable defence... we are all capable of doing terrible things. Worse still, we are capable of letting them happen. Not all monsters are bad, but the ones who are good never do what they could. That haunts me too.
Thanks for the thoughts on part 1 and part 2 of the song. In the past I've let them wash over me a little and haven't really engaged with what they're about.
Lastly, "arena rock majesty" is a delightful metaphor.
This was the song that got me hooked on Jars of Clay. I loved "Flood" and "Dead Man" and any other Jars song that I happened to hear, but when I was listening to the Good Monsters album and this song played through... that started me devouring up anything Jars I could get my hands on. I still cry at it. The unleashing of a broken heart echoing my own is just too much. It entered at the perfect time in my life, when I was angry and full of questions, "Why, why, WHY? Why is the world this way? Why am I this way? Why do You seem so distant and cold?" and I didn't know whether the questions were right to ask or not. And it continues to fit itself to my life, although the emotions that it evokes have evolved over time. Anyway, thanks so much.
A couple of years ago I was doing an experimental art display, a combination of film, music, and acting. It was right after Good Monsters came out, and I decided to build my theme off of this song. Thanks for doing these Dan, I've learned a ton about some of the most influential music in my life because of these. I really appreciate it.
I have to admit, when I first got Good Monsters I skipped past this song a couple of times because it was slow; it took a couple of close listens to let it sink in. "Worlds Apart" was the same way.
These last couple of posts have been really encouraging because you're tackling head-on a lot of the aspects of my personality (and, really, our culture in general) that I don't like.
One of the difficulties with asking questions is, if you're honest, eventually you *can't* present other versions of yourself and still have a clear conscience. The problem is, it's so expected and everyone else is so good at it that once you stop, you really do fall behind in many people's eyes. The whole process is really two different challenges, and facing them head-on means a willingness to let things change.
I think Good Monsters has been my favorite JoC album so far. I don't know if "Work" is on your list of songs to revisit but I'd like to know the thoughts behind it.
Public forums are generally uncomfortable for me to engage in. But I love reading your blogs & the responses. Your thoughts, your stories and your questions allow another life to grow out of your art. I’m grateful for your vulnerability and giving us a glimpse in. And I'm so happy you & your band mates finally came out of your cocoons to get to know each other. It’s strange when the biggest gifts are right in front of ourselves and we ignore them. As a traveling family you can probably get through anything if you take care of each other. Dan, we're all very capable of malice. I hope one day you can lift that perfectionist expectation off of yourself long enough to know you have a huge heart, lots to give and that people can love you back just as you are, with all your ADD, blackness, under-performing and whatever else you deem as personal faults. I thought back to my early childhood when I used to pull the heads off my Barbies & Ken was just so annoying. Why in the world did I think I wanted myself to be perfect when even as a kid, that kind of “plastic perfect” was just irritating, uninspiring & boring? Stay true to yourself. We love you for it!
Whenever I consider a new idea, I always look for someone I look up to that believes it, and then I feel comfortable exploring it further - like I can know that if I'm wrong, at least I'm in good company. With regard to being unashamed to ask hard, sometimes embarrassing questions - ones we don't know the answers to, ones whose answers we are afraid of - I always felt free because I knew Jars was willing to publicly ask tough questions. Your song "Silence" always expressed that value to me - I think "where are you" is one of the darkest questions we ask sometimes. That song always turns up in my "life sucks right now" playlists, and even when circumstances didn't improve, I knew I was in spiritual communion with people who struggled with my same kinds of problems. I'd love to hear your reflections.
The first time I heard this song I thought it was a song about the phrase "oh my God" that everyone, EVERYONE, used. But now, it has such a deeper meaning to me.
I know exactly what you mean when you say that we could be the aggressors. I've realized that too awhile ago, that I could be the one doing the "more horrible" things than I do on a small scale. My lust could be rape. My anger could be murder. My prejudices could be contempt.
Excellent post! Thank you and God be with you!
This post reminded me of something Rick Warren once wrote (paraphrased here) that "under the right conditions we are capable of committing any sin". I haven't seen the aftermath of the horrors described in Rwanda, though I have seen the remnants of evil and poverty left by Communism in Eastern Europe (Romania in particular). The older I get the more I realize that without the rock of Jesus Christ I also could perpetuate such evil given the proper environment.
I've been having trouble sleeping lately, and it always seems to be this song that I turn on at 4 in the morning. It's one of the most beautiful songs I know, even if I didn't fully understand it (and probably still don't).
Thank you so much.
We hosted you on the 2nd night the Good Monsters tour opened. I had been following Jars for several years and seen many live shows. It was obvious that night, at least to me, that a new Jars era was evolving. I love now, looking back and putting pieces together. Thanks for taking the time to share with all of us.
I remember the acoustic tour. It was the best, most intimate, most powerful show.
These posts are bringing so much new light, meaning and power to the songs I have listened to over and over again for years. I cannot thank you enough.
One song I'd love to hear the story behind is "Fly Farther."
Good Monsters is my favorite Jars album. One, because it rocks! But two, and more importantly, because it resonates so much with me, and obviously with so many others. Living in a broken world is no easy thing and not being able to find your voice to express your rage, or fear, or to say something constructive just makes it worse. I think Oh My God in particular captures those words for me. This song always moves me. Dan, thank you for making music that touches the heart and gives voice to those things that linger too silently inside us. Oh, and Work and Dead Man are two of the rockingest songs you've ever recorded-even when you play them acoustically in Lancaster PA because your equipment truck got tangled with a deer in TN! Can't wait to hear the Shelter songs this Saturday in Southern PA!
Thank you for this. Both the song and the post. Oh My God is probably the most powerful song I've ever heard - it moves me every single time I hear it. And it's such a strange feeling, because those three words can express so much fear and so much hope all at once. I suppose when you boil it all down, "Oh My God" is really all we've got.
Wow...I had no idea how much background there was to this song. The song is very powerful, and hearing it live just transends the power from the stage to the audience. It captures everyones attention, and you can almost feel the air getting sucked out of everyones lungs as they hold their breath and HEAR and FEEL the message, and the POWER of the message. People stop moving, everything seems to get still. I get tears in my eyes. So do many others. I now understand why this song is so powerful, why so many people in the audience are affected by it. You are pouring it out to us, and on the album as well. Light Gives Heat has a similar affect. I am blown away and humbled. And thankful.
@Anna, when I read your comment, my guts did a little dance of horror... I don't understand a lot, but I understand a little. Some kinds of suffering we just don't know what to do with in the Western world. I believe everyone who comments on a blog is brave, but you are especially so.
@Mara: "I hope one day you can lift that perfectionist expectation off of yourself long enough to know you have a huge heart, lots to give and that people can love you back just as you are".
What an awesome comment. Wholeheartedly agree.